Stupid neighborhood. Stupid power.

If you read this blog on a daily basis- you know that I NEVER miss a day. Not even the day I gave birth to Parker, the night I was in labor, the night after Parker spent the day in the ER. I think the ONLY times i’ve ever missed was when I was remodeling this stupid house and was here from early evening until the wee hours in the morning.

Well, I missed last night- and I am not happy about it! I had the whole blog planned out.. which has been a rarity lately with everything going on- and then it happened… again.

For the third time this year already- our power went out for no apparent reason at all. No storm, no wind, no horrendous car accident.Just a big BOOM around 8:45pm, and the power was gone.

As always, we get pissed, roll our eyes, and make a call to the power company to inform them of the outage.You know what they always ask as an option for referring your call to the “correct” area?“Are all the lights in your house out?”NO, JUST THE ONE IN MY BEDROOM!Seriously, are people that stupid??? People REALLY call the power company when one light in their entire house blows? Enough people that it’s an option on their main menu?My faith in humanity evaporates more and more every day.

Moving on, so the automated voice on the other line (because it’s never a real person that you get a hold of with Virginia Power) tells us that their “average response time” was 3-4 hours. Great. Midnight.Monday is usually my favorite TV watching night. All my guilty pleasure ABC Family shows, and the season finale of My Life as Liz (which I have unabashedly become addicted to). Oh, and House. A full night.

Not only that, but it wasn’t even the kids bed time yet. Holden always gets a little freaked when the power goes out and is harder to put to bed.. and the house is SO quiet that there’s no white noise to keep him asleep.Parker? Well, with his weird bottle eating (or non eating) habits lately, plus reflux.. he HAS to have his bottle warmed or he won’t even touch them. No power? How are we going to heat the bottle?Joy.. we get to manually light our gas range and attempt to boil water to heat the bottle in. And you know what they say about “a watched pot never boils”, right? Yeah.. that happened. Ten minutes must have gone by and still the bottle was cold.. and Parker was already irritable due to teething and a craptacular afternoon nap.

After putting the kids to bed, what is there to do? Sit in the dark and twiddle my thumbs?I tried, HARD, to connect to someone else’s internet since the only place without power was our street, as ALWAYS.. and everyone’s password was so simple to figure out it was unreal. C’mon y’all, Admin? Password? You need random numbers and letters or people can hack into that crap and seriously mess you up if they wanted to.Even though I “cracked” those passwords, I couldn’t get a strong enough signal to connect to any internet.. so Thomas and I played spider solitaire until my computer died from lack of battery power.That was at 11pm. Wasn’t tired. And then another BOOM- the rest of the neighborhood lost power.SERIOUSLY, Virginia Power?? You can’t just FIX what’s broken, you have to break something else in the process?

I was done after that. Didn’t care if it was early or that I wasn’t tired.. it was time to call it a night because clearly, power wouldn’t be returning any time soon.The only thing I worried about at that point was that the house was very quickly getting cold.Holden has a huge warm blanket.. but Parker is still too young to sleep with one and I was afraid he’d freeze his little butt off.I hoped the power would come back on before that.. HOPED being the key word.. you never know with this place. Last time we lost power, it didn’t come back for 4 days when they claimed it would be back in a few hours.Once we’d dozed off.. incessant beeping began. WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!?Oh, it’s the alarm system that doesn’t even work realizing that it’s not plugged in and it’s battery power is low.After that problem was fixed, drowsily, we dozed off again only for the power to pop back on at 2am. And the lamp by the bed was on.. so being the light sleeper I am, it woke me up. And with that, the heat came back on.. making me break out in cold sweats for the rest of the night.

All in all, a BAD night.. all because of Virginia Power being too damn lazy and cheap to REPLACE the old ass wires and transformers in this neighborhood and doing a half assed job when it all blows up and goes to hell and putting a bandaid on something that needs friggin’ surgery so it just happens again a month later for no reason. I have NEVER lived somewhere, where the power went out so often for no reason whatsoever. And i’m tired of it!

So, that in a nutshell, ladies and (very few) gentleman.. is why there was no blog last night.

Back to our regularly scheduled baby ranting tomorrow. Assuming the power doesn’t go out again.